shinylib

Webvisions: Hacking the enterprise with social media

DL Byron is nothing if not a nut. He’s the geek behindTextura Design,and the co-author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business. He runs the srs bike culture blog, Bike Hugger and does cool stuff like host Twitter giveaways at conferences. To be clear, I like any dude who starts a presentation by encouraging the audience to do epic shit. Although I didn’t really get all of the aspects related to hacking the enterprise, DL did give a decent seat-of-his-pants overview of 2.0 social stuff, peppered with such phrases as “Yeah, you gotta pursue your vision — stuff you love, and rock it hard.”
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Webvisions: Blogging for a living

Blogging for a living: Taking your skills to the next level

Jim Turner, founder of Bloggers for Hire and creator of the Genuine Blog (a “Daddy blog”) spoke about the challenges and triumphs of blogging professionally. He suggests that there are significant differences between those seeking to blog part-time and those looking for full-time professional blog-writing gigs.
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Webvisions 08

Webvisions is officially done and over with. It was an awesome time. I think I will have quite a lot to say, but I’m going to attempt to break things up into smaller, segmented posts. We’ll see how that goes—my conference writeups are always sorely lacking and out-of-date.

From my standpoint as a librarian, Webvisions was everything I wanted Online Northwest to be…but without all the pink sweaters and discussion of cats. Also missing is a critical discussion of aboutness, classification, and human language. That is, Webvisions is an awesome place to geek out about design, but as a practicing librarian I have to take all of that design and interface geekery and apply it to the library context.

In general it was a supremely refreshing experience to immerse myself into design, interface, and interaction but I did find myself wishing for less theory and more practical application. I know, those of you who know me are finding it difficult to reconcile that statement with the theory monkey you’ve come to love and tolerate. I think my friends would tell you that I am pretty intolerable after several days of immersive geekery—I become hypercritical of the discrete elements in the world and how they fail to seamlessly flow together.

Rather than attempt to apply a structure to the posts, I’ll just do them chronologically. I’ll leave it to you to decide how the session information interrelates.

Day 1 at Webvisions

• Blogging for a living: Taking your skills to the next level (Jim Turner)
• Hacking the enterprise with social media (DL Byron)
• Design is in the details (Dan Rubin & Bryan Veloso)
• Total recall: Complementing information architecture (Sean Cowne & James Keller)

Day 2 at Webvisions

• Data portability, privacy and identity: Welcome to the Open Web (Scott Kveton)
• The language of interaction (Bill Rouchey)
• The Web is dead (Roger Black)
• Website optimization in seven easy steps (Kim Blessing)

2.0 titles

It’s interesting that recently I was reading some David Lee King archives about 2.0 sounding job titles. Although my job title hasn’t really changed (I still don’t know what it officially is, I just go with Faculty Librarian) it has opened to incorporate some other ideas. I am now some kind of Web Reference Librarian, or sometimes Web Resources Librarian, we can’t quite decide.

Basically this is a more official sounding way to keep doing what I already do: bombard my colleagues with “helpful” emails about tech things happening in the library world. I’m the one you can count on to say, “Hi. Can we have LibraryThing tags in the catalog?” and other such insanity. It’s something of a liaison role to the web and Millennium teams, which is fine because I spent quite a bit of time communing with those folks anyway.

My hope is that being in this intermediary role will allow the reference team to think really big about what they want out of our web presence. I hope for the various tech teams to be able to do really well what they already do really well: design, implement, deal with our inane nagging, and other such things. The bonus here is that each department should be able to go on speaking in nuanced and jargony language without having to translate for the benefit of the other. I already speak geek and librarian (well, on good days anyway, on less shiny days I just mumble incoherently).

Mostly, as I told my colleagues, I’m just making it up as I go along.

Invite Share

I have beta sickness, always have. I just feel this irritating compulsion to get involved in the ground floor of everything. Consequently I usually end up bored and leaving by the time other folks are showing up. Ah well, that’s a different issue altogether.

Anyway, if you also suffer from beta sickness you might want to check out Invite Share. Invite Share is a free website where people share the invites they have to give. You don’t have to barter or beg, you just click the button (the email address you use to register will be displayed to other users) and someone will come along and click a button on their end that delivers you an invite. Very simple. Within 15 minutes someone responded to my request for an invite to Yahoo! Mash. I’m not sure I’m going to do anything with the account, which seems to be some kind of blog/profile service. MySpace for Yahoo. Anyone want an invite? It seems I’ve got plenty.

In process…

Well I am relieved to find that it’s not the upgrade to 2.5.1 that totally borked the shinyblog, it was that post on Course Hero (see, I knew they were evil!). This is good.

Since I had to completely disassemble and reassemble the php so many times I am now thinking about overhauling everything in its entirety. For that reason the shiny will be a bit tarnished in the coming days as I iron out exactly what it is that I want. Thanks for hanging in there…

Connotea

For quite a while now I have been thinking about this massive archive of PDF formatted articles that has been accumulating on my hard drives for years. As it happens, I am a physical and digital packrat and the idea of having to search for these articles again one day irritates me. I spent some time tinkering about in Access and various other DB tools, trying to find a way to sort, classify, and house my articles.

Eventually I abandoned the idea of developing such a tool myself because I really just don’t have the time or the know-how to design and implement something particularly well done. The folks over at Infodoodads recently reminded me about CiteULike, so I gave it a whirl. CUL comes close to doing what I want, but there’s one critical issue that drives me bonkers. CUL does not support multi-word tags. I cannot stand the insert underscores all_over_the_place and so I abandoned the project after inserting a paltry three citations.

I am now attempting to use Connotea to achieve the same purpose and I am happily able to report that I can at least use multi-word tags, although I haven’t investigated much beyond that first feature. What I am noticing right off the bat about Connotea is that you cannot upload the actual document to your personal library, an aspect of CUL that really lends some portability to your documents. In reality I have all of these articles on both a portable drive and my stable home drive, but still…

Anyone know of a cite that blends these features? That’s what I really need.

Flock redux

Several weeks ago I wrote about Flock, a “free, next generation web browser” which is built on the Mozilla Firefox platform. I said that I could see some merit to the functions of the browser but that ultimately I wouldn’t be making the switch.

I have to report that since that time I haven’t stopped using Flock. It slowly took over my browsing needs. To be sure the thing is a bit buggy at times–during my recent new car research I had to fire up the ole Firefox because Flock balked at some of the code on these flashy auto websites, VW in particular.

Since the original post there has been an update to Flock and although I haven’t felt any performance differences, I trust there are some. There are some bugs with posting to WP–like editing a post with the Flock WP client will totally bork the post you’re trying to edit. Flock acknowledges this and I assume they are working to fix the problem. Regardless I still find that Flock solved my need for a WP client that was fairly lo-fi yet didn’t require me to visit my blog and login.

too amused by Clicky

In lieu of a real post I will talk about how I am way too amused by the variety of stats provided by Clicky, my newest stat agent for bloggish spaces.

I have no idea who all of these people are! Why was someone Googling the shinylib? Where did they hear about me?

Clearly those posts I made at the new LISjobs forums had people curious as to who I might be. Unfortunately, I can see that there were 40 views on my request for ACRL 101 feedback, but no feedback.

Someone at St. Edward’s University was checking me out. Hi Austin, TX!

Well, that’s enough inane updating for the moment…

Flock

Although I have been really against trying Flock, for no reason at all, I finally gave in to some advertisement this morning and against my better judgment, I “clicked here” to download.

I am posting this with the WP function of the Flock browser. So far it is fairly easy. I click on the feather icon, which I have already figured out is the blog button, and a window pops up. Since I already found the setup function I should be autologged in… we’ll see.

Assuming everything posts according to plan, I am fairly pleased with the post features. There are nice WYSIWYG options for those who need them as well as “source” and “preview” options. I think source is like the raw edit view.

I am guessing there is drag and drop file activity, let’s find out. So I opened an explorer window and dragged in a photo file. Flock attempts to use a service it knows I am associated with and so offers to upload the file via Facebook. Since I don’t really want to upload the file through Facebook, I’m going to go back and try to configure flickr via Flock and see if that now becomes an upload option. As soon as I go to flickr a banner appears at the top of the Flock window letting me know that I can click remember account to add my flickr account to a Flock sidebar. Very cool. Now back to the drag and drop.

Sweet. I easily upload the file to flickr and tag it and set my privacy settings. The file appears right in the blog editing window and by right-clicking I get options for image placement, alt text, etc. Not too shabby.

In reading the Flock extensions page I see that many Firefox add-ons should work in Flock and they encourage you to test your favorites to find out. Apparently you will get a pop-up message letting you know if there is a compatibility issue with the add-on.

I’m not sure that I am ready to give up Firefox, personally, but I can really see how a lot of people may make the move to Flock. I think at the heart of it all, as I’ve said before, I’m no twopointopian. There are certain things I find useful about social networking and its software, but I don’t feel the need to be plugged in and visible all the time. I can live just fine without seeing my friends’ Facebook statuses at all times.

I don’t even want to get into what kind of commentary it is on my life that I have a web browser open at pretty much all times.

The kind of browser that would really appeal to me would revolve around research, not social networking.